


you can lean on my arm as you break my heart

by korrasamis



Category: The Flash (TV 2014), The Flash - All Media Types
Genre: Content warning: Suicide, F/M, and mentions of trauma, fun stuff kids!!!!!!!, me: yes its finally done, or mentions of it rather, you: isha is this really the thing youve been bitching about for months
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-28
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 11:49:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9489821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/korrasamis/pseuds/korrasamis
Summary: In psychology, absolute threshold is defined as the smallest amount of a particular stimulus that can be detected. One of the most common stimuli endured is pain.From the moment Barry came to live with them, to finding out she might die in five months, Iris West has always learned to endure.





	

**Author's Note:**

> a special shoutout to sim, my rock and my best friend for arguing with me over dumb fic stuff and for beta-ing this  
> also to bea who also listens to me ramble about dumb fic stuff  
> dedicated to kathryn.  
> 

_if you need to be mean / be mean to me / i can take it and put it inside of me / if your hands need to break more than trinkets in your room / you can lean on my arm as you break my heart_

i don’t smoke, mitski

When Joe first tells Iris about the true origins of her mother, she thinks that there’s no emotion to describe her feelings other than pure unadulterated shock. She then proceeds to go home and set fire to her coffee table to watch it burn.

Okay wait.

It’s just all so _sudden_. If Iris is being honest, she doesn’t remember staring at the open flame at all, doesn’t even remember that side of her own mother. And it scares the shit out of her.

So she goes home like any self respecting 27 year old with unresolved mommy issues and promptly spends the next forty five minutes on some random psychology website researching why she can’t remember a single thing. Finally hits the jackpot, and it’s the motherlode of jackpots.

 _Repressed memories are memories that have been unconsciously blocked due to the memory being associated with a high level of stress or trauma. ... The term repressed memory is sometimes compared to the term dissociative amnesia, which is defined in the DSM-V as an “inability to recall autobiograp_ —

Oh.

 _Oh_.

And that’s how she ends up on the floor of her living room, staring at her peppermint marshmallow candle, trying to jog any sort of feeling other than the numbness. She’s rooted, the one constant in ever changing environment of her living room. In the corner of her eye she can see the picture of her and Barry at the fair when he first came to live with them. She’s rooted and she can still remember that night.

It had been late, really late, coming home and Joe had pushed the both of his kids upstairs to wash up before bed, and Iris, sensing something missing, came down wrapped in a Princess Unicorn blanket to find Joe consoling a crying Barry. There was a fire then too. She’s rooted, but this time, she’s 11 and still thinks Kyle Reckner is the best thing since sliced bread and denim on denim is a good idea and Barry’s her best friend in the whole world. Oh. Now she remembers.

_Her mom had sent her a letter,_ saying she was alive, and sober, and Iris had been shocked for one, wrecked by guilt the other. She had to tell her dad, it was all just so sudden. She wanted her back in her life. Iris wanted to soar.

“It’s—hiccup—just—hiccup— so hard, Joe.” Tears streak his face. “I just want them back so bad.”

“I know son, and I’m sorry.” Joe looks close to tears as well. They both looked so sad. Iris remembers this clearly now. It was painful to watch. She had wanted nothing but to protect them from all bad things in the world. She’s rooted, but now she gets it. That night, seeing the look on Barry’s face, the pure anguish at never being able to see his mother again, made her feel so selfish. There was no way she could share her mom’s letter. She’s rooted then and that’s when she decides to stay rooted. Her mom was gone, and she had to pick up the mantle. That was the first time Iris made the decision to be strong for her family. She’s rooted, but now she can’t move.

When the candle tips over, she shakes. It starts a small fire, but not one she can’t contain, and the only real casualties are a few cooking magazines. It’s only after she stops shaking is when she realizes she was crying. No matter, it’s only a small fire. She must’ve forgotten about the letter, burned it after Joe and Barry went back upstairs. She goes to bed too. Hopes Francine doesn’t ask her about it.

——————

The Photo stands beside her laptop on the desk, a relic wholly out of place in Iris’s Art-Deco-On-A-Budget-Okay-Not-Really-But-Dammit-She’s-A-Journalist-Not-A-Homemaker apartment. So she turns it over, figures it would be less distracting. The glass might scratch, turns it back up. Immediately regrets it. The girl in the picture is beaming, no doubt because of the ice cream. But it’s different, this smile. The smile of a child that hasn’t been held to the awfulness of the world yet. _Lord knows I’d pay hell to be able to smile that way again_ , she muses. 

Her mom looks like a dream, smiling just as wide as Iris. She looks so beautiful in this moment, like a flower pressed into history before it can wilt. (Iris doesn’t know much about flowers, everything she tries to grow dies.) 

There’s something stewing in her stomach, a soup of different emotions. Normally she’d call Barry and they’d spend the better half of the night having heart-to-hearts, but as of late she thinks it best to leave him be. No use bothering him with her problems when he clearly has worse things to deal with. 

Longing stabs her then, thin, elongated slices meant to slither down your throat and get stuck in your chest and stay there. A sigh. Things were so much easier before the particle accelerator. Francine is still beaming. 

Hurt is the broth, the main substance holding it together. It wades, steaming and swirling. Push and pull. _Why did you leave me? Why didn’t you come back sooner? Why are you choosing now to see me again? Do you not love me? Is it something I did? What did I do to you that made you leave? I’m sorry I made you leave, please come back. I wish I was good enough to make you stay. I’m sorry I wasn’t enough to make you stay._ That one’s the worst to swallow. Too fast, and it burns, ice cold. 

Anger is dicey, haphazard and appearing in flashes, bobbing up and down. There are questions this time as well. Francine came in and took her perfect (well, relatively perfect) snowglobe life and rocked it out of kilter. What right did she have? Coming in at this time declaring now it was convenient for her to contact her only daughter. God, everyone would be better off if she never tried to come in contact. No, stop. Iris takes a sip of her water; she can’t win anything by being angry. Anger is an investment she just can’t handle these days. (Really, it’s the fact that she can’t just brush it under the rug like everything else, it has to feel lived in, and to be lived in, you have to _feel_.)

Most of all there is a thick blanket of fatigue that settles all around her. It’s familiar, yet not comforting. Iris is tired. Deep down inside of her, she wants to be a family again, if she’s being honest. Wants to have that Hallmark Christmas Photo, the snow globe with the mom and the dad and the space for the one tiny-but-still-mighty girl. Takes a look at the picture again. The girl in the picture is smiling, no doubt because of mint-chocolate chip, but it’s a different kind of smile. A smile of a girl that has not been broken yet. A fork in the road. A decision to be made.

She’s about to take the jump when an email icon pops up on her laptop. Her inside man at CCPD she had emailed two days ago. _I got the background check you asked me about, Iris,_ it read. _I don’t think you’re gonna like it._

She pivots. No shitty Hallmark card, no mint-chocolate chip and no room for two children in the snowglobe. The soup goes stale. 

——————

“It’s fine.” The words pry open lips when he asks her about Francine. There is a slight curl at the top of her lip when she says this, the only betrayal of emotion. Neither of them notice. Francine had that curl too, Iris had seen it while looking through the old photos Joe kept in the upstairs office room that was no longer in use. _You look so much like her_ , Joe had said. Then she’d swallowed bile. Now it was rising.

Earth-2’s Harrison Wells was an unwelcome surprise, to say the least. Iris had gotten the 911 text from Barry saying to come to S.T.A.R. Labs immediately. But now, sitting by her coffee table going over the parts of the gun—grip, rear sight, slide stop, barrel, muzzle, trigger—her dad gave her she doesn't think all the warning texts in the world could have prepared her for this. 

Acutely, she can tell that someone’s talking to her—grip—, beside her, that there is movement—rear sight— all around her but all she can do is stay rooted. There’s a sword right above her head. One, two, three, four, five inches—slide stop— away from her skull. She stays still. Everything is still. There is no sound—barrel— and there is no movement and there is no emotion but fear. Pure unadulterated terror settling into her skin and making a home in her body. Somewhere far away—muzzle— she feels a breath strangling to break free through her chest, but her ribs feel so broken. _It hurts._

The entire time he speaks to the team she feels that dread creep back into her bones. Harry may not be exactly like their Wells—trigger—, but he looks the part. Same hair, same glasses, same scrutinizing look—grip— that made her want to grip tightly to Barry’s hand and get him the hell out of that place. She saw Eddie in him too. She saw the red sprawl on the shirt she had gotten him for Christmas and _blood didn’t look like how it did on tv why doesn’t it look that way on tv this blood was the color of cherries and the lipstick she bought last week—_ rear sight _— it should’ve been me instead of him and there was so much all around i’m so fucking sad i just want to sleep forever and never wake up why do i feel this way i didn’t think it was possible for someone to bleed this much—slidestopbarrelmuzzle— and everything was so red and—_

She stops. Puts the gun down. Goes upstairs and heads to bed.

(She can’t make Eddie proud if she’s dead).

——————

It’s been what? One, two weeks now since she found out about Wally? She has to tell someone now, oh my god. A part of her, one she doesn’t quite like, wants to keep it from her dad and Barry. After the months of her being in the dark about Barry’s life changing secret, the selfish part of her wants to make him find out on his own. It almost wins, if it wasn’t for the guilt.

It doesn’t so much eat at her then taunt her, always reminding her that it’s there. The feeling is fucking awful. So when she swallows her pride to go tell Barry, the shock of walking in on him eating face with her dad’s partner is not the most pleasant cocktail of emotions. 

The first thing she sees is his smile. Because of Zoom, she thinks it looks like such a welcome stranger on his face. The next thing she sees is Patty, who does not garner the same level of emotion, but hey, she’s learning. Baby steps. They both look at her like two teenagers caught making out in the back of the car and after a quick goodbye Iris is left alone with Barry after a long time.

He fills the gaps of silence in the way only Barry can but once again, she can’t seem to focus on his words. 

Barry looks so _different_. The bags under his eyes have gotten better and he doesn’t look as skinny, and he’s _glowing_. Seeing him so happy only made Iris realize she wasn’t (Seeing him with Patty caused a different kind of ache, one she won’t be able to pinpoint for a little more time) The tears fall unprompted. They seem to be doing a lot of that these days.

Except Barry is with her, and his eyes are on her in a way that they haven’t been for a long time and Iris is no longer a fragment but a person and he’s asking her if she’s okay and she wants to burst.

So she tells him. About Wally. Leaves out the crying and the fatigue and the oversleeping and the guilt and the one time she almost killed herself with the gun Joe gave her for protection.

And honestly? It feels really fucking good. 

She’s in his arms looking at the snow coating the roof of Duke Bakery and feels a little more whole. Still hasn’t told him (or anyone really) everything. But baby steps

_You don’t have to do this alone_

——————

The drive to Nora Allen’s grave is silent. It rains, that’s expected. A cemetery on a sunny day is the universe’s way of telling you it’s a sadistic fuck. (The day Francine was cremated, the low was a 75.) But it never shined on days Barry went to visit his mom. Iris figures it’s the one thing the universe owes Barry, after taking everything else from him.

He tells her she means everything to him, and her heart just wants to _burst_. She could never fathom being that important to someone, but somehow, with Barry, she gets it. The high drops, of course. It’s natural, a law of physics, she tells herself. She has to come back down to earth sometime. But that’s not the problem.

Barry stays at the tombstone for a while longer to talk to his mom. He’s done this a ton of times before, and Iris has been present for a good number of those times. It’s the same every time, Barry greets his mom, tells her about his day, interjects with his weird little Barry commentaries, talks about how much he misses her and loves her. Nothing’s new. That doesn’t help the pit in her stomach from growing again.

Barry had pictures of him and Nora, and not just that he remembered exactly where and what he was doing in those pictures(no matter how much she tries she can’t recover any memories from before her mom left.) His eyes light up when talking about all the places she’d visited and all the things she wanted to achieve(she knew next to nothing about Francine other than that she worked in pharmaceuticals.) Barry had memories of his mother that were good (Iris’s were forever tainted, just like everything else in her life.)

As much as she hates it, a part of her is jealous. A bond between her and her best friend was broken, another burned bridge that reminded her that her life before the Flash became even more out of reach.

She wants share this with Barry. Feel his hands on her face as he reassures her, consoles her. Gives her his undivided attention. It’s a wild feeling, her heart’s about to jump out of her chest. Has to get it out of the hole in her chest. Like Christmas. Like being set free. 

He gets up and it’s there, dancing on the tip of her tongue. It’s done it’s time and it’s ready to be shared with the world and— _oh_.

First thing she notices are his eyes. They look so _tired_. (In the overcast, they look kind of…...blue. Eddie’s eyes are—were blue.) Whatever happened in the Speed Force must’ve been more taxing than she thought.

“You ok?” She asks. He shakes his head.

“Let’s just go home, okay Iris?” Home. He wraps his arm around her tiny frame, she forgot how easily she fit inside of him. All those years growing up together and she still isn’t used to the size difference. _Barry almost died today_. (She tries not to think about the implications of having two boyfriends die within the span of one calendar year. There are more morbid things she could do.)

They stay connect, fingers interlocked, on the way to the car. Iris remembers then: she had something she was going to say to him. Decides against it. There are more important things to deal with anyways.

——————

Caitlin’s on the bed, and S.T. A.R. Labs is cold. The first time Iris had entered it was after the particle accelerator exploded, then it looked like a cemetery for a potential breakthrough. The swivel chairs still had a dent in the seat, there were granola bar wrappers in the trash and the desks still had pictures. It still looked lived in, yet so void. That night she had been too preoccupied with Barry to think about the countless number of faceless people who might've lost something too, and with Caitlin in front of her, wounds freshly cleaned, she felt that sadness creeping again. God she hates this place.

“You feelin’ any better?” she asks. Iris had, of course, volunteered to be the one to clean her up, make sure she was taken care of. Iris always made sure people were taken care of. That was just what she did. After her mom left, she took on the unofficial role of Woman Of The House. Play nurse and momma bear for a bit, give a quick pep talk, and off they left, spirits lifted and faith in humanity renewed. And it wasn’t like it was particularly daunting and strenuous, she found happiness in caring for other people, she really did.

A sigh. “No, not really if I’m being honest.” came Cait’s reply.

“Well that’s warranted, you did kind of have to carry this big, life changing secret for that long of time and I mean, it certainly can’t be easy,” 

“That’s not what I mean.” Silence. A beat. “I mean I really felt all those things that I said to Barry about what he did to us, and I still do. A part of me, one that is way bigger than I am proud of, blames him. Being apart of Team Flash has been a dream for me, but sometimes I feel it’s done more harm than good for my health, and admitting that, feels _really_ good actually.” 

Iris just stares.

“Caitlin, I-” 

“No, let me finish,” she continues “Being assaulted and the stuff with Jay being Zoom has been really hard for me and especially with losing Ronnie twice now, I- It’s just been a lot to deal with, I’m sure you feel the same way with Ed-”

“What about Eddie?” it comes out sharper than she intended to, and both of them wince.

“Iris I’m sorry for bringing it up, but i’m just trying to lend a hand.” Caitlin apologizes, voice rising at the end. Iris complies

“I get that, but I promise you,” envelopes her icy hands with her warm ones, “I am fine. Eddie was a long time ago. I moved on, I’m good now. I appreciate you reaching out, but I really think you should focus on your own recovery. Maybe see a therapist? I know some good ones from when I was a psych major.” 

Caitlin sighs, and it’s cold. “Alright, but if you need anything, I’m here.” Iris nods, and as she’s about to reply she gets another text from Barry.

“That’s my cue,” she says with a smile, gathering her purse. As she’s about to get up, Caitlin engulfs her into a tight hug.

“I know you said that you’re okay,” she whispers “And I respect that, but I just want you to know, it’s okay not to be okay sometimes; and it’s even more okay to admit that.” She lets go as quickly as she took her, and Iris is stunned. Walks out to her car and heads home to Barry. Even in her home, which is warm and inviting, she feels cold pams on her lower back.

_It’s okay not to be okay sometimes._

——————

The aftermath is almost as good as the during for them both, just as heady and sensual. But this time it’s languid. Sheet over sweaty skin over someone’s limb and Barry and Iris all wrapped up together in lethargic bliss. Yeah it’s corny, but she really wouldn’t have it any other way. In fact, it’s deserving. After all that’s happened to the both of them over the last couple years, she has more than enough leeway to be mushy and couple-y. And if she must say, it feels pretty fucking awesome. 

Her train of thought is interrupted when her phone buzzes. Barry groans and presses his face into her chest. “No real life stuff.” He mumbles, though it comes out more like “No reallife stumf.” She laughs. He grins. “That tickles.”

“Well I’ll make sure not to laugh next time your face is in my tits.” buzz.

“You make it sound so unromantic.” A snort. Buzz.

“Well not everything about sex is sexy.” buzz.

“You should probably get that.” buzz, and a kiss to her collarbone. 

“You’re right.” But before she can pick it up, it goes to voicemail. Iris rolls over to the other side of the bed rather unceremoniously, (which elicits a laugh from Barry) and checks caller ID.

“That’s weird. One missed call from Caitlin Snow.” She frowns.

“Oh shit, that might be about the new meta I was telling you about, the one with the weird claws for hands? Cisco calls him Edward Spoonhands.” Iris snorts and plays the message.

“Hey Iris, I’m calling to tell you I found that list of psychiatrists specializing in trauma I was telling you about the other day soooo uhh call me back when you get this! I’m really happy you took my advice about seeking a therapist by the way. Bye Iris.” Shit.

 _Shit shit shit shit fuck fuckfuck shiiiiiiiiiiiiit_. Shit. She doesn’t turn around.

The post-sex charge that was in the air is almost gone and is now replaced with a thick tension. Barry makes the first move.

“Therapist? For wh-what’s wrong Iris are you okay?” 

She’s hovering on the edge. There’s a fork in the road. She teeters. There’s a decision to be made and once she picks one road you can never take the other one again. Step over now, and there’s no holding back. One foot over. The fall could entail anything

“No, not really.” It’s not a jump so much as a leap.

The pit shrinks, and Iris swears she feels lighter.

 

**Author's Note:**

> 1) title taken from i don't smoke by mitski  
> 2) sorry @ all psych majors i created this in psychology a when i used one of my vocab words to birth a 3k+ fic  
> 3) iris west is mentally ill suck my dick berlanti!!!!!!!!!  
> 4) you can find me at tumblr at room93


End file.
